Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Eat, Eat, and Eat Again

Buhdaarai saihan shinelesnu? That is our mission president's motto. He always says, "id, id, dahaad id" or eat, eat and eat again, haha. And boy did I learn that this week. Mongolians bond with friends and family using food. I've known that throughout my mission, as every time you visit someone they give you a drink and at least cookies/biscuits/candy if not food too. Well, it was taken to a whole new level this week because of Tsagaan Sar!

Tsagaan Sar from what I understand from the many explanations I've received celebrated the changing of the first moon. In comes the new, the happy, and after Tsagaan Sar, in comes the warm weather hopefully! For the holiday, which lasts about a week, they visit family and friends and relax or say hi, do special traditional things and eat each others' food, haha..... SO MUCH FOOD!!!!

Since the first day is usually for only family to visit, we were only able to visit two houses who invited us. The second day we visited three more. The third day, we visited none, but instead had city zone training and English teaching training all day. The fourth day, we were actually able to teach one person. The 5th day we visited two more families. The 6th day we did not visit anyone, and today is p-day.... that's how it went. When we visited people they would feed us and feed us and feed us again!! We, along with all the other missionaries in Mongolia, got sick and were not feeling too great this week. No one should be forced to east that many buuz and other Mongolian food.... ugh. My stomach has never been so unhappy in my life!!!

Some other fun experiences this week: A taxi guy kept offering to take us out and show us the town and some fun.... um no thanks, we just want to puke. A lady who screamed and cursed us from her window... not sure what she cursed us with. A drunk man at a bus stop who tried speaking to us in every language he could think of... Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian "aloha", and followed us around the bus stop for 10 minutes until some Mongolians helped us out. The coolest bus driver ever who had 20 mirrors, blasted American pop music, drove like a crazy man, and stared at us in the mirror and sang to us, haha...We found Asia town of Mongolia that had a Chinese restaurant, Korean restaurant, Japanese sauna, and another Chinese chicken place. A 17 yr old boy at one of the houses we went to who spoke hilariously awesome English and tried out all his lines on us, haha. One house where we went to visit an old woman and her drunk son and his friend came home. At first they were scary and angry, but we became their friends and soon they were laughing and practicing Russian and English on us but we couldn't leave as long as they were there so we were stuck there for 2 hours. I got a new mask this week that doesn't look like a duck as much and fits my face better. So all in all, our week included getting sick from buuz, wearing awesome Mongolian clothes, studying lots, doing a deep cleaning of our apt with our free time, and run ins with drunk Mongolians.

Mongolian children are so beautiful!

We did however, as we met with many members, talk about missionary work a lot. We were able to find many many ALA's and investigators from them, and will hopefully be able to grow our work a lot this week! You members truly are the key to missionary work. Don't be afraid to talk to your friends and refer people to the missionaries. We need your help to forward this work!

This Friday through Monday, I will be going to Hovd (the farthest area from a mission home in the world... next to Kazakhstan... I will fly there!) to do an STL split. I love you all!!!

PS - the true cycle of Tsagaan Sar- eating the buuz, feeling sick because people made us eat so many buuz, the buuz coming out :( and calming our stomach with Coke (our mission doctor encourages the drinking of coke during Tsagaan Sar)